Conference Agenda

The scientific edition Encyclopaedia of Tablature is being developed under the editorship of John Griffiths, David Dolata, and Philippe Vendrix as part of the Ricercar Lab at the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours, France. It will be published by Brepols in 2026. It will comprise over 400 examples of tablatures for some forty instruments, selected from thousands of surviving sources, with full-colour facsimiles, transcriptions, and commentaries on all the pieces. The examples will cover the approximate period from 1300 to 1750. The Encyclopaedia of Tablature gathers sources from 130 music libraries and archives from some twenty different countries worldwide. On the one hand, there is obvious value in looking at the varieties of institutions that hold tablature sources, including the large public institutions, the smaller private libraries, and even personal collections (which we can also call libraries). On the other hand, how are these institutions dealing with modern challenges like digitisation and open access? How are issues of ownership or custodianship being solved? How do researchers contend with the lack of uniform criteria for the provision of services? How do discrepancies in efficiency and cost affect their work? What about the use of archival documents in scholarly publications, which will never make any profit? Presented from a collaborator’s point of view (who is both a musicologist and a librarian) and illustrated with selected examples, these are only some of the questions to be discussed in this paper.

Many studies of sheet music and of binder’s volumes (also known as recueils factices, Sammelbände, or álbumes de música) emphasize the importance of dealer’s stamps in identifying both provenance and paths of transmission. Stamps allow librarians, archivists, musicologists, and other researchers to trace the dissemination and consumption of printed music (c.f. Busch 2025; Izquierdo König 2023; Bailey 2021; Gleeson 2019). Some stamps provide detailed information, offering the name of the dealer, the location of the shop, and even the date of the sale. Others are much more obscure, containing only the seller’s initials or a stylized icon, and require extensive detective work. Yet despite their importance to music scholarship, there are no dedicated reference sources for this research. As a result, dealer’s stamps are sometimes confused or conflated with other markings, such as ex libris or royalty stamps.

This presentation describes a project to identify and document music dealer’s stamps from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, drawing on representative examples from North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, East Asia, and Oceania. It discusses the history of these examples and their significance within their respective milieux. It surveys some strategies and tools that may be used to interpret these items as well as some of the new questions which emerge from closer study. Ultimately, it illuminates not just this important component of the music trade but also the role of the dealer’s stamp as both a source of information and a form of musical iconography.

With over 200 items, the Ignaz Pleyel Collection held by the Rita Benton Music Library at the University of Iowa represents one of the largest assemblages in the United States of the early printed and manuscript scores of French composer and music publisher, Ignaz Pleyel (1759–1831), thanks to the efforts of the former head of the library, Dr. Rita Benton. With support from Dr. Benton’s family, the multi-year Ignaz Pleyel Project seeks to update and enrich the online presence of the collection to facilitate accessibility and utility for researchers, performers, and public use.

Part one of the project involves ensuring that the library’s records in RISM accurately reflect the collection and are as complete as possible, a challenge considering that many records have not been revised since their initial entry in the online database from the print volumes.

Part two focuses on improving representation of Pleyel’s works on the IMSLP/Petrucci Music Library platform by sharing digital copies of scores and parts for public use. The final part of the project is to increase the functionality of the digitized version of the collection curated by the University of Iowa via both image remediation and metadata enhancement. Time and resources permitting, the project will also follow the same steps for items in the collection from Pleyel’s publishing company and design public-facing elements to convey the significance of the collection and sustain the legacy of Dr. Benton’s work.

This presentation will describe the project's creation and goals as well as its challenges and progress.